Catherine Paquette holds a PhD in Urban Planning and works at the French Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) in France. She is an expert in urban and housing policies, social housing, mobility and transportation, and urban regeneration in Latin America. In her most recent presentation at the Congress of the Future, held on Wednesday, January 15, she explained how cities have ceased to be spaces that allow social and human development, “to become spaces of deteriorating living conditions, both environmentally and socially”. Examples are socio-spatial segregation and the crisis of public space with a tendency to privatization. In general, due to the rise in land prices, it is increasingly difficult for people -even middle class people- to live in a well-located house, which implies long commutes. The crisis is no longer limited to large cities; intermediate cities are also being affected by similar processes, such as road congestion or socio-spatial segregation. Faced with this negative scenario, a new paradigm emerges, the ; “a space that leaves no one by the wayside… and where the inhabitants not only survive, but live well”. In his opinion, when talking about “sustainable”, many people immediately think of “green”. Moreover, we are currently focused basically on the environmental perspective, but we forget that it must be accompanied by a social and economic perspective and that we must establish an integral way in which we can address the different issues taking into account all dimensions,” she says. Moreover, Catherine Paquette, many times what we do in the environmental area has contradictions with the social area, generating negative social impacts. For example, green social housing in Mexico has a lot of eco-technology that makes the housing and the neighborhood sustainable; however, these social housing neighborhoods currently have a problem of abandonment and deterioration because they are located 30 km from the city, in the middle of nowhere, because people do not want to live there. The problem is that the social dimension is not a business for anyone, while the green city is a market for someone. Therefore, if the authorities do not take care of social development, nobody is going to do it. The main actor in the city factory, according to the expert, is the real estate developer and if there is not a sufficiently robust public authority in its capacity to regulate and propose a course for urban development – setting neighborhood instruments that exist – prices go up and real estate developers make maximum profit with poor quality towers, as sadly happens with the vertical ghettos in Santiago. Thus, he points out, the current city model, with little regulation of urban development, is incompatible with a sustainable city.
